The Mandela Effect: Parallel Universes, or Just How Memory Works?

ARCHIVE FILE · Theory explainer. Key dates: 1977, 1990, 2009, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2022. This is not breaking news. It’s part of the Redacted Weekly evergreen archive. We explain conspiracy theories; we don’t endorse them.

What happened

Is it the Berenstain Bears or the Berenstein Bears? Does the Monopoly Man wear a monocle? If your answer is “Berenstein” and “yes,” you’re in big company, and you’re wrong both times. The Mandela Effect is the name for shared false memories like these. The big question is whether they say something about reality, or something about the human brain.

In 2009, paranormal researcher Fiona Broome described vivid, detailed memories of news coverage of Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. In fact, he was released on 11 February 1990, led South Africa as president from 1994 to 1999, and died in 2013. Broome reported that hundreds of other people had written about having the same memory, some while he was still alive, per Wikipedia’s article on false memory. She started a website to collect cases and speculated that the cause was “movement between parallel realities.”

The footage

We’re not embedding video for this case. The evidence is experimental and survey data, not footage. The featured image is a public-domain White House photo, per its Commons metadata, of Nelson Mandela, alive and well, with President Bill Clinton in Philadelphia on 4 July 1993.

Timeline

• 12 September 1977: Steve Biko dies in police custody, a possible source of the “died in prison” memory.
• 2 August 1980: The Bologna Centrale bombing damages the station clock.
• 11 February 1990: Mandela is released.
• 1994–1999: Mandela serves as president of South Africa.
• 1996: The Bologna clock is stopped at the time of the explosion as a memorial.
• 2009: Broome names the Mandela Effect.
• 2010: The Bologna clock false-memory study.
• 5 December 2013: Mandela dies.
• 2016: Mandela Effect memes spread widely in the U.S.
• 11 October 2022: Prasad and Bainbridge publish the first lab tests of the Visual Mandela Effect online.

What witnesses reported

All of these are common memories that turn out to be wrong:

• The Berenstain Bears spelled “Berenstein.”
• Looney Tunes spelled “Looney Toons.”
• A cornucopia in the Fruit of the Loom logo.
• “Luke, I am your father” in The Empire Strikes Back. The actual line is “No, I am your father.”
• A monocle on Mr. Monopoly.
• “Mirror, mirror on the wall” in Disney’s Snow White (1937). She says “Magic mirror on the wall.”
• A black tip on Pikachu’s tail.
• A 1990s genie movie called Shazaam starring Sinbad. Snopes suggests this blends real memories: Sinbad in a genie-like costume hosting a 1994 TV marathon of Sinbad the Sailor movies, Shaquille O’Neal’s 1996 genie film Kazaam, and the 1960s cartoon Shazzan.

Believers claim these show people shifting between parallel universes or alternate timelines, that someone changed the past, or that the effect is a “glitch” in reality, which links it to simulation theory. These are claims, not facts.

What the research found

Bologna, 2010. The clock at Bologna Centrale was damaged in the 1980 bombing and repaired soon after. In 1996 it was stopped and set permanently to the time of the explosion as a memorial. In a 2010 study, 92% of respondents familiar with it falsely remembered it as stopped ever since the bombing, per Wikipedia.